I had written of the long white hair in the left eyebrow. In my pictures of
the dead face, however, the right eyebrow was the thicker. It hardly seemed
likely that the right eyebrow had suddenly begun to grow after his death.
And had he really had such long eyebrows? One might have concluded that
the camera was exaggerating, but probably it had told the truth.
I need not have been so apprehensive. My Contax had a Sonner 1.5 lens.
It had performed quite on its own, without promptings from me. For a lens
there was neither living nor dead, there was neither man nor object, not
sentimentality or reverence. I had made no great mistake with my Sonner
1.5, and that, I suppose, was that. The face was dead, and the richness and
softness were perhaps the work of the lens.
I was struck by a certain intensity of feeling in the pictures. Was it in the
dead face itself? The face was rich in feeling, yet the dead man himself had
none. It seemed to me that the pictures were neither of life nor of death.
The face was alive but sleeping. One might in another sense see them as
pictures of a dead face and yet feel in them something neither living nor
dead. Was it that the face came through as the living face? Was it that the
face called up so many memories of the living man? Or was it that I had
before me not the living face but photographs? I thought it strange too that
in pictures I could see the dead face more clearly and minutely than when I
had had it before me. The pictures were like a symbol of something hidden,
something that must not be looked upon.
Afterwards I regretted having taken the pictures. It had been heedless of
me. Dead faces should not leave behind photographs. Yet it was a fact that
the Master’s remarkable life came to me in the pictures.
